Individualising collectivity: Rethinking the individualism–communitarianism debate in the context of students’ resilience during the Covid-19 era

Abstract

The emergence of Covid-19 and its diverse impacts on human life ushered in the need to rethink some of the old ideas that humans have lived by. The desire to preserve human life amid threatening circumstances, without giving up on the values of life, requires the reordering of critical sectors of social existence. Against this backdrop, the paper aims to achieve three principal objectives. First, with the Covid-19 pandemic in mind, it reinterprets the individualist-communitarian debate. Second, it argues that the human instinct for self-preservation, reinforced by the Covid-19 pandemic, forcefully compels the concept of a person torn between the individual’s efforts to survive and a community committed to an environment enabling survival. Third, the paper extrapolates the concept of ‘person’ developed in objective two to reflect on students’ resilience in the context of the ‘new normal’ that has characterized academic success during Covid-19. While employing philosophical methods of conceptual and critical analyses to achieve these objectives, the paper concludes that academic success among students in the Covid-19 era has demanded the effort of willing students, combined with a supportive responsible community.